In John Curran's Stone Edward Norton
plays a smug and spiritual convict opposite Robert De Niro's prison parole officer, the two actors face off for
the first time since 2001’s The Score. De Niro was unfortunately absent
during last week’s roundtable interviews for the film, but Norton was available.
Since Stone doesn’t yet have a distributor, all the parts of the conversation that deal with details of film
itself are left out. Stone is still looking
for distribution, but I’d expect to see it pop up in theaters within the next
year.
How did you develop your character from what you
saw on the page?
I looked for inspiration
in some of the people I spoke to. I had the opportunity to talk with a lot of
men who were in prison, the facility we were working in, in the weeks before
the shoot. Whenever I saw a quality in someone I thought was really interesting
I would have John [Curran, the film’s director] come to the prison and meet the
same person. It was cobbled together mostly out of meeting guys from that
prison.
You did a lot with the character’s physicality, and
it changes throughout the film. How did you work on that?
The look of a guy like
that, to be totally honest, there’s so many people in prisons—it’s not that
revelatory that these guys in prison are really inked up. Tons of them have
shaved heads or cornrows, it’s very, very common. You meet some of these guys
who have been in there a long time, and they’ve maybe made some changes and are
very thoughtful—and yet they’re very intimidating presences sitting in front of
you. One of the guys, he said you’ve got to armor up in here. I think people
insulate themselves physically against that environment.
I know you made changes to the script. What kind of
stuff did you add?
I thought it was a
little unformed when I read it. I didn’t understand what I was after. Many,
many of the things in the film were not in that script originally. It was set
in the South, it was much more of a plot-driven story, and I didn’t quite get what
John was after with it. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested, I just didn’t think
it was there. I put him back to it, and he came back—the more he talked about
it, the more I realized he was using the script as a springboard into these
much deeper issues.
Do you generally do work on the script when you
take on projects?
I would say the majority
of times no, but John and I worked so closely on The Painted Veil, and
we just have a rhythm. Once we knew we knew we were going to do it we sat down
together and worked on it for maybe six weeks. Then we rehearsed with Bob for
about a month and then everyone else came.
How sensitive do you have to be going into a situation
like that?
I’m never delicate about
it. John is a close collaborator of mine—we’re working on another thing now. He
sent [the Stone script] to me saying, “What do you think about this, and
I give him my response. He’s just trying to grow into something better too. We
trust each other a lot, and he was asking me to work on it.
How have your feelings about the industry changed
since you first started? And characters’ definition of redemption?
I guess if you work in
the business long enough, the structure of the movie business, it ebbs and
flows and changes. The film studios are going through a lot of the same things
the record industry went through. Frankly, it’s not been that dynamic and
innovative in terms of figuring out how they’re going to sell their product in
new forms. They’ve been caught out and DVD revenues are dropping—that makes for
a slightly less freewheeling environment for creative people to come and get
their movies made and get them out. You’ve got to be—they’re not being that
innovative, but I think that means we have to be a little more innovative. As
entities they may not be designed to be that innovative. To me, one side of the
industry is compressing, but there will be some very exciting—in the next 10
years, much as it has with music,
I think the ability of filmmakers to form direct conversations with people who
want to watch films
is going to do some kind of end run around this system that’s been in place for
a long time.
